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Fitting farewell for the great Peter Lehmann

Jul 29, 2013
The throng at Peter Lehmann's Old Redemption cellar. Photo: Dragan Radocaj

The throng at Peter Lehmann's Old Redemption cellar. Photo: Dragan Radocaj

The day had a regal air.  The sky was blue and clean and the light had that honest clarity that only a perfect Australian winter day seems capable of turning on when it’s needed.

The gathering in the late Peter Lehmann’s name was appropriately held in the Old Redemption cellar at the mighty winery he built.

They came from everywhere.  From Canada and Keyneton, Switzerland and Kapunda.  Millionaires and simple farmers fronted the bar in the sort of quiet unity that communities these days scarcely manage to afford.

There was dear Norty Schluter, who loved PL like a brother.  Norty’s family has owned the Greenock Creek Tavern since 1870.  Norty laughed heartily, as he always does, but with quiet tears on the side.

Norty and PL taught me about harness racing when the big Lehmann house was going up and paying for that took many a seasoned wager at the Kapunda Trots.  We sat one night in the pub, adding a few schlücks to the schnitzels when PL muttered that he needed a big win that evening to pay for his verandah posts.

“They’re a hundred and ten bloody dollars each,” he said.  “That mightn’t seem too bad, Whitey, but there’s a hundred of the bastards.”

Wolf Blass was there in Old Redemption, advising me again that I don’t support business growth. Wolf blended his first red out the back of Norty’s pub.

John Vickery, the mighty Riesling meister, was there, as gentle and determined as ever.  When I was a babe in this game, I was at his winery once at four o’clock in the morning.  It was vintage, and there was Vickery, riding around the winery on his pushbike in a dressing gown, pyjamas and slippers, with a torch.  Just keeping an eye on things.  Reminding a winemaker to rinse a tap.

The stalwart Andrew Wigan and Charlie Melton were there, and Peter Scholz, and many other winemakers who are now senior men but started as boys working for PL, just as he started a whole lifetime ago, learning his dots working for Rudi Kronberger at Yalumba. Rob and Michael Hill Smith arrived together.  We noted the marks of the years we carry, feinting surprise.

There was a good turnout from the McLaren Vale mob, with names like Paxton and Tolley and Parkinson: people who build things from the ground to your table, like their Barossa colleagues do.  People who look after grand old buildings and simple farm sheds as much as special vineyards and favourite slices of country; people who keep our countryside looking like countryside.

There was an army of wine critics from near and afar, all looking a bit lost about the disappearance of newspapers coinciding with the terrible lack of winemakers who offer the sort of Christmas pudding stories that fell off Lehmann like ripe fruit in a heavy year.

There were restaurateurs and food merchants, from paté magnate Maggie Beer to fishmonger Michael Angelakis; there were musicians and arts entrepreneurs, and Rod Schubert, the Mengler’s Hill painter whose works have for decades helped flood the Lehmann household and wineries with colour.

Andy Piewell was there.  He builds giant timber dining tables which will never wear out.  Important people, see?

There were wine merchants, of course.  The Saturno Brothers.  People who help us decorate our lives.

And there were The Growers.  Farmers wizened by winter pruning; men with leather in place of skin, and knowledge of country and weather and nature occupying the slabs of brain most of us now devote to television, iPhones and Facebook.

Then, of course, there were Lehmanns.  Doug and Libby, surviving from Peter’s marriage to Nan (both her and their son Bruce are deceased); Philip and David, from his life with Margaret; and a restless herd of vibrant grandchildren carrying that loud Lehmann gene that seems certain to guarantee us that there will always be Barossa folks who look just like PL.

And Margaret.  The bright and fierce one who showed a whole generation of us how humans can achieve truly remarkable things by lining their love nest with intellect as much as fearless determination.

After the crowds went home, or off into the pubs and restaurants, a small band of fortunates sat around that famous kitchen table, drinking bottle after bottle of the 1970 Saltram red that PL made for their wedding.  We had it with pizza.

Next morning I woke in a darkened room and a big bed with black sheets and red pillows, with fake leopard-skin suitcases stacked up beside.  While I found some relief in the fact that I was alone, I wondered where the hell I was.  Eventually I remembered the brandy, and the Golden Scrumpy my host David Franz Lehmann had carefully decanted into me at his place.  It’s 40% Riesling, 23% Golden Delicious apples, 20% Semillon, and 16% Jonathan apples (top gear; 8.2% alcohol; $80 a slab from David Franz).

The feeling was similar to the morning I woke on Doug Lehmann’s kitchen floor, after his fiftieth, with a strange head on my shoulder, breathing malty miasma into my ear.  It took some courage to turn my head to discover which misplaced blossom was the source.

Fortunately, it was Rommel, Doug’s labrador.

When somebody asked me who had been there at the big PL house that night, I found it tricky for a moment.  It wasn’t so much identities who had shared that gallant evening, but a team I could not easily describe.  Then, like all things Lehmann, the elusive suddenly became very obvious.

“There were a lot of feminists there of about my age,” I said.  PL liked it like that.

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